Better call mom: Schools still see mothers as the default parent to contact

A US study found schools are more likely to contact mothers than fathers, even when both parents are equally available. Researchers say this reinforces unequal caregiving responsibilities, adding to mothers' mental load and affecting work-life balance despite efforts to share parenting duties

Sydney: The start of the school year brings a familiar list of responsibilities for parents: buying school supplies, keeping track of forms, coordinating transportation and responding to a steady stream of emails from teachers and administrators.

Although many families strive to share these responsibilities, research has consistently found that mothers tend to shoulder a larger share of the work tied to their kids’ schooling.

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That includes not only attending school events or packing lunches, but also the less visible work of scheduling doctor appointments, signing up for after-school activities and responding to emails or calls from teachers and administrators.

We are economists who study gender and families. We wanted to understand whether schools themselves might unintentionally contribute to this imbalance by defaulting to contacting mothers more than fathers. Our recent research suggests they do.

Who do schools contact first?

Economists and other social scientists have long recognized that mothers spend more time than fathers on childcare, even when both parents work full time. And even though men have assumed more caretaking responsibilities over the past several decades, women still spend more time caring for their children and homes.

This gap matters, because the way childcare is divided up shapes much more than parents’ work schedules. It can contribute to chronic stress and burnout and influence how couples perceive fairness within their relationships.

It can also influence parents’ careers by affecting work hours, opportunities for advancement and how much they earn.

In the summer of 2022, we conducted a nationwide field experiment involving more than 80,000 K-12 school principals across the United States. Schools received an email from a fictitious two-parent household with both a mother and father interested in enrolling a child. The email listed both parents, each with a phone number and asked the principal to call one of them.

Because we randomly varied the names and wording of the emails, we could isolate whether a parent’s gender influenced who received the callback.

It did.

When neither parent appeared more available than the other, mothers were about 1.4 times more likely than fathers to receive the first phone call.

Among principals who called someone back, roughly 60% contacted the mother first and 40% contacted the father.

We also tested whether providing more information changed these patterns. When the email explicitly stated that the father had more availability to talk, principals became substantially more likely to call him. But even when fathers were presented as the more available parent, many schools still called mothers first.

Another subtle cue also mattered. If the father sent the email and copied the mother, schools were more likely to contact him. Yet even then, mothers continued to receive a substantial share of the calls.

These findings suggest that many schools still view mothers as the default parent to contact about their children, even when they are given information indicating that fathers are equally – or even more – available than mothers.

Importantly, this does not necessarily mean that school staff members are intentionally contacting mothers. School administrators often have limited information and make quick decisions based on experience. If they have historically found mothers to be more responsive, calling them first may seem like the most efficient choice.

But when similar decisions are repeated thousands of times across schools and other organizations, they can reinforce the unequal division of caregiving responsibilities that already exists within many families.

A broader pattern

Schools are only one source of child-related demands.

Previous research has shown that mothers are more likely than fathers to schedule doctor appointments, coordinate extracurricular activities and manage many of the behind-the-scenes tasks that keep family life running smoothly. These responsibilities are often described as the “mental load” of parenting, because they involve planning, monitoring and coordinating.

Our research suggests that schools and other organizations may unintentionally amplify that mental load by directing more requests toward mothers.

In surveys we conducted alongside our experiment, educators and other adults who regularly interact with families – including childcare providers, coaches and medical professionals –  also reported contacting mothers more often than fathers.

One phone call may seem inconsequential. But over the course of a school year – and across doctor offices, sports teams, camps and other activities – those interruptions can add up. They become one more demand on parents’ time, and that demand disproportionately falls on mothers.

This perspective also helps explain why gender gaps in caregiving can persist even among couples who are trying to divide responsibilities more equally. The unequal distribution of parenting tasks is shaped not only by decisions within households, but also by expectations and routines outside the home.

Many schools allow families to specify whom to contact first or designate different contacts for different situations. As those routines are established at the start of the school year, making those preferences explicit may help school communication better reflect how each family chooses to share responsibilities.